چکیده:
Although culture-oriented contents can be regarded as determining factors in the performance of EAP university students' receptive and productive tasks, a paucity of investigation on the impacts of culture-oriented materials on their receptive and productive tasks performance is strongly felt. To partly fill this gap, a culture-oriented English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) course book was developed based on Tomlinson's (2001) materials development framework. A total of 180 participants were selected according to their language proficiency results, and were stratified into four receptive and productive EGAP task groups encompassing Lecture Presentation, Note-taking, Academic Writing, and Figure Drawing. Then, the developed course book was taught and practiced in each of the EGAP classes, and the treatments pertaining to each EGAP task were implemented separately in each group. Having passed twenty treatment sessions, the participants were administered a posttest including the main four skills. Then, through a modified version of Mukundan, Hajimohammadi, and Nimehchisalem's (2011) course book evaluation checklist, the students were shown to have positive attitudes towards the culture-oriented content. Furthermore, a one-way ANOVA test was used for analyzing task performance and indicated that culture-oriented content had a significant impact on the Iranian EAP university students' task performance. Similarly, a paired samples t-test revealed that culture-oriented content affected the EAP students' Lecture Presentation, Note-taking, Academic Writing, and Figure Drawing separately. It was further observed that Lecture Presentation as a productive task for enhancing the speaking skill was highly influenced by culture-oriented content in the EGAP classrooms. The findings suggest that the significance of the first culture as the determining yardstick for incorporating materials attributed to the second culture in EAP language teaching arenas should be taken into consideration. This can materialize by conducting receptive and productive EGAP tasks in general, and lecture presentation in particular.
خلاصه ماشینی:
That is, scrutinizing the effects of culture-oriented materials on the Iranian EAP university students' performance of receptive tasks (note-taking and figure drawing) and productive tasks (lecture presentation and academic writing) has not been taken into consideration in any of the previously performed studies.
The latter can conceivably provide material developers and teachers with practically applicable receptive and productive tasks in the forms of note taking, academic writing, lecture presentation, and figure drawing on the basis of socio-cultural content (Subroto, Jazadi, & Mahyuni, 2019).
Moreover, none of the previously mentioned experimental studies examined the effects of culture-oriented materials on the Iranian EAP university students' performance of receptive tasks (note-taking and figure drawing) and productive tasks (lecture presentation and academic writing).
Therefore, the number of participants in each class varied, and based on the four receptive and productive EGAP tasks, the students were non-randomly divided into four General English class groups including two 50- student class groups (lecture presentation and academic writing) and two 40-student class groups (note-taking and figure drawing), and all of them were equally given a pretest encompassing the four main skills (IELTS USA Practice Test, 2018) which indicated their language ability according to IELTS standards (British Council, 2016).
It is of note that the nature of the content (culture-oriented) was considered the independent variable, and the Iranian EAP university students' receptive and productive EGAP tasks performance including lecture presentation, note-taking, academic writing, and instructed figure drawing after reading instructions were regarded as the dependent variables of this study.